reply on: The Solo Beef Block: analyzing a mysetrious block and a secret mining pool? \ stacker news ~bitcoin

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271 sats \ 2 replies \ @optimism 14 Feb \ parent \ on: The Solo Beef Block: analyzing a mysetrious block and a secret mining pool? bitcoin_Mining

I think you're right.

After some clicking through Arkham's intel platform for the spend tx of this miner's previous block reward from block 881,324.

It went to likely exchange addresses:

3HkLtD... was later consolidated straight into the cryptodotcom cold wallet - so that's with 99.99% certainty a deposit address for that exchange. Note that you wouldn't be able to withdraw more than $100k per day from that platform as a retail user (link)
1HYF36... is 2 transactions away from the coinsquare hot wallet, safe to assume that it's either a change address that then sent to a coinsquare deposit address (17p7kx...), or that it's a coinsquare deposit address itself. However, coinsquare has low limits for retail - much lower than the 2.5-3 BTC that was sent there - CAD 30k (link), so this could give some hints about what kind of entity this is.

It looks like there's nothing curious on 1/30 in terms of outflows from coinsquare in the range of $50k-$350k worth... mostly the usual suspects: wintermute, galaxy digital, B2C2, and other (untagged but behaving like) trading desks / arbers.

I think that it's unlikely that it's a "hidden pool", more likely that it's some entity that simply cashed out their block reward. Let's see what happens with this next reward...

Final note: whomever they are, if they are not a pool then they should really not reuse addresses 😬

30 sats \ 1 reply \ @Kenobi OP 17 Feb

Thanks, I wasn't aware of Arkham's offering in regards to cointracking.

So the "hidden pool" hypothesis seems less likely, but this begs the question: "Who or what is this?"

We'll have to stay put.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @optimism 17 Feb

Arkham simply tags addresses just like what bitinfocharts has been doing for years. Both the former's data and UI are more comprehensive than the latter, so it makes sense to use that platform for on-chain sleuthing. You'll have to do most of the tracking yourself or through another tool though.

Re: this miner. If they keep on reusing the address, or keep on applying the same spending patterns, it's likely that we'll learn more about the operation, eventually. Part of me hopes we'll never know. For pools, providing transparency is important - both for their miners as everyone else. But for true solo setups, I wouldn't mind seeing a lot more of these unexplained origins.